The Post-Social Turn: Challenges for Housing Research

Abstract

In an editorial entitled ‘Living Room’ for the journal Urban Geography (Vol. 25, 2004) Susan Smith made reference to the ‘tired state of housing studies’. Smith argued that the ‘post-social turn’ in sociology and cultural geography has largely gone unnoticed by housing researchers and because of this, the radical implications of its epistemology have yet to be explicitly addressed. This post-social turn, elsewhere referred to as Science and Technology Studies, Actor Network theory, feminist technoscience and post-humanism, calls on researchers to decentre the human as the nucleus of social life and in turn recognize the significance of non-human actors (e.g. animals, technology and material artefacts) within social analysis. While in recent years housing scholars have begun to embrace post-structuralist accounts of social life, including discursive and constructionist theories, there has only been limited engagement with post-social assumptions and concepts. In view of this gap, this paper reviews recent developments in post-social theory with a specific focus on the implications of this approach for housing studies.

Keywords:

• Post-social turn
• housing studies
• actor network theory
• performativity

Introduction

In a recent editorial entitled ‘Living Room’ for the journal Urban Geography, Susan Smith (2004) made reference to the ‘tired state of housing studies’. Smith's main point was that new developments in cultural geography, which she termed ‘the post-social turn’, have largely gone unnoticed by housing researchers and because of this the radical implications of its epistemology have yet to be explicitly addressed. Although in recent years housing scholars have begun to embrace post-structuralist theories, including discourse and constructionist approaches, explicit engagement with the concerns raised by post-social writers such as Amin & Thrift (2002), Callon (1986, 1998), Callon et al. (2002), Deleuze & Guattari (1988), Haraway (1991), Latour (1993, 1999, 2005), Law (1986, 1991, 1999, 2003), Law & Hetherington (2000) and Urry (2000) has lagged. These writers have stressed the need to decentre the human subject as the nucleus of social life and have called for greater recognition of non-human actors (e.g. animals, technology and material artefacts) within social scientific inquiry. In response to Smith's observation, this paper provides an overview of recent developments in post-social theory and draws together the beginnings of a new post-social housing literature with the aim of facilitating the further application of post-social concepts and assumptions in housing studies and extending the current research agenda. Although some resistance is anticipated to an approach that signals a clear break with the modern humanist project that has informed social science research and in turn housing studies, it is argued that the post-social approach is important in re-energizing classical themes within housing studies, such as domesticity, the operation of housing markets and housing policy, and opening up several new productive lines of inquiry, including the role of non-humans (i.e. companion animals, plants and technologies) in the constitution of home, neighbourhood and city, as well as the interplay of multiple human and non-human actors in the production of sustainable housing outcomes. Moreover, housing researchers who interrogate housing issues through a post-social lens may in turn contribute to the development and extension of contemporary post-social debates.

Modernity and the Post-Social Turn

The ‘post-social’ turn is used here to denote the growing scepticism towards the legacy of the Enlightenment project, in which human reason and scientific rationality are viewed as the twin-motors of human progress and development (Munck, 2000; Porter, 2001). With specific regard to the practice of social science, such broad philosophical discontent has recently found expression in the development of a new post-social research agenda; one that emphasizes new types of bonds between humans and objects (Knorr Cetina, 2001a, 2001b). This approach has its roots in the anthropological study of natural scientists and their laboratories in the 1970s and the 1980s (see Callon, 1986; Latour, 1993; Law, 2003). Initially termed ‘Science Studies’, this emerging body of work later became elaborated into a more formalized position labelled Actor-Network Theory (A-NT). While A-NT represents more of an attempt to destabilize the foundational categories that had come to dominate social scientific thought in the 20th century than a formalized overarching theory of social life, in the process of writing against ‘modern’ social science such theorists offer contemporary social scientists a new language and a new set of tools from which to approach their research inquiry.

At the heart of the post-social agenda is the belief that the modern impulse to separate the natural world from the social world is fundamentally misguided. In his influential essay, We Have Never Been Modern, Latour (1993, p. 13) argues that modernity has facilitated an asymmetrical scientific practice in which practitioners are discouraged from studying scientists and politicians in tandem. Within this modern conception of the world, clear demarcations are drawn between culture and nature, the human world and the animal kingdom, and conscious beings and inanimate objects. The A-N theorists call attention to the inadequacy of such frameworks in the face of proliferating networks that enrol the human and the technical simultaneously. Here they advocate a social scientific practice in which explanations start from recognition of quasi-objects (hence the hyphen that connects actor and network). For A-N theorists, a scientist is not a contained individual, but rather someone who operates within a relational space with other actors and objects, which together comprise a temporary and fluid assemblage of things such as laboratory equipment, computer hardware, soil samples and assistants.

Post-social theorists have provided an important extension to social constructionist interpretations of the social world, and the post-modern and post-structuralist celebration of the ‘linguistic turn’ in social science. Post-social writers do not privilege the linguistic, but rather they recognize that the socio-technological networks that they trace and describe are “simultaneously real, like nature, narrated, like discourse, and collective, like society” (Latour, 1993, p. 6). As Latour (1993) explains:

The ozone hole is too social and too narrated to be truly natural; the strategy of industrial firms and heads of state is too full of chemical reactions to be reduced to power and interest; the discourse of the ecosphere is too real and too social to boil down to meaning effects. (p. 6)

In contrast to the social constructionist approach which emphasizes the multiple ways in which problems are defined and meanings are circulated (Jacobs et al., 2004), post-social writers seek to illuminate the ‘socio-technical’ construction work that is involved in making some ‘truth-claims’ more durable in particular contexts than others. Therefore, in seeking rich description and understanding of a situation, it is not just the play of words that the social scientist needs to be attuned to but also the assembly of material objects and their shared relational history with other actors.

Therefore, to do post-social science is to dispense with a human-centred world in which rational individuals interact with one another for particular ends, and instead to begin with an understanding of the social world as one that is comprised hybrids and assemblages of the human and the non-human. Donna Haraway's (1991) ‘cyborg manifesto’ encapsulates this approach well. As a creature that is simultaneously animal and machine, the cyborg represents an imaginative resource for constructing a new politics and social scientific practice that recognizes “partial identities and contradictory standpoints” (Haraway, 1991, p. 154). Post-social researchers have abandoned the practice of conceptualizing and classifying the social world a priori in favour of examining how particular categories have developed and stabilized over time. This approach is reflected in Law's (2003) call to privilege verbs over nouns, that is, to describe the way things are achieved rather than the way things are.

Material Culture and Performativity

A central feature of the recent post-social turn has been a renewed enthusiasm for material culture within social theory (Anderson & Tolia-Kelly, 2004; Miller, 1998; Pels et al., 2002). Of particular note is Daniel Miller's (1998, 2001) extensive body of work on material cultures. In his edited collection Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter, Miller (1998) distinguishes his and his co-authors' approach from earlier formalist or structuralist models of material culture which were derived from linguistics and which treated objects as signs. Working from Simmel's premise that “human values do not exist other than through their objectification in cultural forms” (Miller, 1998, p. 19), Miller does not suggest a new general theory of the object world, instead he celebrates a relatively undisciplined and pluralistic approach to the study of material culture thereby reflecting the diversity of the material world. However, Miller (1998) does want to move beyond the specificity of each case of material culture, arguing in favour of a comparative understanding of the use and meaning of objects and tools in relation to other material domains. Miller (1998, p. 11) calls for a shift away from “a simpler Marxist ontology” that privileges the constitutive role of production towards an articulation of a new key moment in which “people construct themselves or are constructed by others increasingly through relations with cultural forms in the arena of consumption”.

Miller's (1998) interest in consumption and material culture is compatible with a post-social programme that insists on the presence of non-humans within social scientific analyses. However, renewed theoretical interest in objects and matter poses additional challenges for mainstream social scientific practice, namely a radical reconfiguration of the relationship between agency, object and structure (Latour, 1996; Law & Singleton, 2000; Law, 2002; Pels et al., 2002):

Indeed, the promise of the turn to a renewed questioning of matter is in the development of concepts that attune to the openness of matter and therefore refuse to speak of matter as an undifferentiated externality standing apart from the social or cultural. (Anderson & Tolia-Kelly, 2004, p. 672)

At issue has been the treatment of objects within the social sciences as simply backdrops to social action. Here Latour (1996, p. 235) identifies the three main roles ascribed to objects within past analyses: objects as the “invisible and faithful tools” of human subjects; objects as “determining superstructure”, that is the fixed material terrain on which human activity is staged; and objects as “projection screens” for human values. In contrast to earlier realist understandings of things as unmediated and static, this “new materialism” emphasizes the “thoroughly socialized” nature of things (Pels et al., 2002, p. 1). Agency is not limited to the human subject, but rather agency resides in the heterogeneous networks (or assemblies or associations) of humans and non-humans, which can be reworked in multiple ways:

‘Things’ … do not have the unity the modernists believed they had, nor do they have the multiplicity postmodernists would like them to retain. They are lying there, in the new assemblies where they are waiting for the due process that will give them their unity, at the end, not at the beginning. (Latour, 2000, p. 120)

In an earlier paper, Latour (1988), under the pseudonym of Jim Johnson, uses the example of the door-stop to demonstrate his understanding of an object as an effect of an array of relations (or an effect of a network) and in turn how a technical artefact is simultaneously a highly moral, social actor. Here Latour (1988) argues that although the door-closer substitutes human action and removes the problem of undisciplined human behaviour (i.e. not closing the door behind them), the door-closer also imposes particular behaviours back onto humans by encouraging them to enter and exit doors in a different way. It also operates in a moral sense by prescribing who can and who cannot enter through the door (e.g. very little and very old persons). Further, the door-closer can break down thereby demonstrating that “nonhumans are not so reliable that the irreversibility we would like to grant them is complete” (Latour, 1988, p. 302).

An additional feature of this materiality debate has been an appreciation of practices and a performative understanding of objects (Law & Singleton, 2000; Nash, 2000; Pels et al., 2002; Thrift, 1996). In contrast to a classic understanding of performance whereby people perform surrounded by material props, this new appeal to performativity considers the performance of both people and objects alike (Law & Singleton, 2000, p. 771). An understanding of the performativity of the body has previously been advanced by post-colonial and feminist writers, who share an interest in dismantling essentialized understandings of identity and re-formulating the political subject through attention to the strategic use of particular subject positions within different contexts. For example, in her work on the performative aspects of gender identity, Judith Butler (1993) engages directly with the problem of how a socially constituted self might at times evade or subvert social convention. In a similar vein, post-social writers recognize that “social and material practices recursively generate new social and material practices, technoscientific knowledges, and versions of the social and material world” (Law & Singleton, 2000, pp. 766–767). Law & Singleton (2000, p. 766) argue that although the “world is sensed—indeed is constituted—as solid and obdurate” A-NT assumes that “hybrid social-and-material practices are constrained and enabled by equally hybrid pre-existing practices”. The stability of an object, defined by A-NT as an effect of an array of relations, relies on the invisible work entailed in maintaining such networks. For these writers “deconstruction” of the hetereogenous network that holds together a single entity or object “is always possible but, given the backdrop of existing practice, also very difficult” (Law & Singleton, 2000, p. 766).

Post-Social Accounts of Housing and Neighbourhood

Having provided an overview of the concepts and assumptions that comprise the post-social turn, the paper now outlines three classic sites of investigation within housing studies that are currently being re-imagined through the application of a post-social approach: dwelling and domesticity, the operation of housing markets, and housing policy and neighbourhood planning.

Dwelling and Domesticity

There are several areas of research within housing studies that are already well-versed in the effects of material objects on everyday life. A key example is disability housing research, which has scrutinized the assumed accessibility of dwelling and neighbourhood design, and highlighted the scripts and assumptions that inform modern architecture (Imrie, 1996, 2004). Similarly, feminist researchers have called attention to the domestic norms that inform post-war housing design; with open-plan kitchens and living areas enabling married women to manage domestic chores and entertain friends and family simultaneously with the aid of white-goods rather than domestic help (Johnson & Lloyd, 2004). However, an explicit engagement with the emerging post-social research programme has extended this analytical gaze to new sites within the domestic realm (Franklin, 2006; Hitchings, 2003, 2004; Miller, 2001). This research has also provided a more thorough consideration of the role of the non-human than within earlier analyses.

Miller's (2001) edited collection, Home Possessions, develops new perspectives on the material culture of the home through the close study of people, their homes and the objects that surround them. In his contribution, Miller is particularly interested in pressing the boundaries of human and non-human agency. He draws the reader's attention to the mundane ways in which a home and its inhabitants transform one another. For instance, “moving in and maintaining a home we have constantly to contend with the pre-given decorative and other ordering schemes of the house” (Miller, 2001, p. 110). Having detailed the way in which homes and their inhabitants negotiate a compromise between the house's given order and the inhabitants' preferences, Miller is also interested in illustrating how such objects and orderings can be oppressive and alienating for the inhabitants. Here Miller turns his attention to the experiences of residents in a council estate who feel constrained in their capacity to refurbish and redecorate and thereby negotiate such a compromise.

Like Miller, Hitchings (2003) in his study of private gardens (or rather the way plants and people live together) invites readers to think about materials and matters of the home space from many different vantage points; not just that of the householder or the gardener. He argues that while the accounts he collected from amateur gardeners emphasized the person's own agency in the production of the garden and denied plants their individual existence, a different story emerged when he began to consider the construction of the garden from the perspective of the various plants within the backyard. Here Hitchings (2003, p. 107) observes that “the direct presence of these plants and their needs constructed a person that was committed to their care”. So while gardeners enrolled plants in the implementation of their overarching garden design, at other times the plants enrolled these gardeners as carers and guardians. As he notes:

The status of the garden and the gardener were not fixed. They were constantly shifting between the enroller and the enrolled, the performer and the stagehand. Plants shifted in and out of being. The gardener oscillated between a designer and a plantsperson. (Hitchings, 2003, p. 107)

In this paper, Hitchings (2003, pp. 108–110) responds to two major criticisms directed towards A-NT: that the approach is teleological and downplays the operation of power within particular accounts and that it diminishes the agency of humans. Viewing these issues as inter-related, he argues that engagement with A-NT ideas attuned him to the ‘nuance and ambivalence’ inherent within the performance of power, with different entities demonstrating a capacity to dominate at different times within differently networked relationships.

In another challenge to the humanist ontology governing housing research, Franklin (2006) provides an account of the co-presence of humans and companion animals within the home. Franklin (2006) contends that housing research has been framed too narrowly and that it is necessary “to bring in perspectives that can cope with complexity, with its relational materialism, its sociotechnical hybridity and semiotics” (p. 138). His study of companion animals in the home is premised on the observation that:

homes are not home just to humans but that they are home to humans living very closely and purposefully with other species, particularly cats and dogs. (Franklin, 2006, p. 138)

He argues that animals are increasingly being viewed as members within the household and that such animals occupy housing in profoundly different ways to their human companions. Moreover, homes are undergoing significant change in terms of the design and the configuration of space as they become locales for human and animal cohabitations. Therefore, new research is required to explore the anthrozoological formations now taking place within the home.

The unifying theme across these diverse studies is an invitation to housing researchers to rethink relations between the human and the non-human and to recognize the perspective and agency of non-human actors such as houses, plants and animals. This approach challenges earlier accounts of the home by giving voice to both the practical ways in which humans and technologies are entangled as well as the considerable emotional bonds that are forged between humans and non-humans in the process of making a home.

The Operation of Housing Markets

Alongside an emphasis on material cultures, a post-social housing agenda demands a rethinking of central concepts within housing studies such as ‘the market’, ‘economy’ and ‘society’. Such concepts have previously been subject to scrutiny within the housing literature. For example, in contrast to classical economics, new instititutionalist theories (see Granovetter, 2002) have embraced a contextual understanding of the ‘market’ which entails consideration of power relations, institutional dynamics and how these interactions impact politically and socially. Moreover, narrow definitions of humans as ‘rational actors’ and unitary notions of the housing market have been critiqued (see for example Housing Studies, 1996, ‘Special Issue’ on housing economics). However, the post-social approach has generated further debate over the social construction and performance of the economy and housing markets (Smith, 2004; Smith et al., 2006).

Following the influential work of Michel Callon (1998) on The Laws of the Markets, Smith (2004, 2007; Smith et al., 2006) and her colleagues focus attention on the specific and accountable processes by which markets are made, rather than how markets can be modelled. For Smith (2004, p. 91), housing markets can be viewed as ‘trading places’, that is the locations in which exchanges are actualized, while ‘trade-in-places’ is used to denote the ways by which households use their home equity to purchase other goods and services. In further work on performing housing markets, Smith et al. (2006) investigate the attitudes and practices of housing intermediaries, as well as their role in shaping local cultures of property exchange. Here they provide insight into “how (housing) markets become practical enactments of economic models” (p. 88). They argue (p. 92) that the employment of abstract, naturalized understandings of the housing market by housing market professionals can inadvertently contribute to price instability. Smith et al. (2006) are interested in highlighting the complex interplay of human and non-human actors in the creation of local housing markets in order to not only provide a fuller account of markets but also to “inspire a normative debate” about “what they might, one day, become” (p. 95). Their point is that if markets are made, they can also be re-made.

Heather Lovell's (2005) recent work on low energy housing further demonstrates the utility of a post-social approach in thinking about the operation of housing markets. For Lovell (2005) the housing market is best viewed as a “socio-technical system, whereby the social and the technical are interlinked” (p. 815). In contrast to classical economic theory, her analysis draws attention to the influence of a product and its particular characteristics on market operations. Here Lovell suggests that lack of demand for low energy housing is linked to characteristics of the product itself. First, “consumer purchasing decisions are not related solely (or even primarily) to the quality of the housing product, but incorporate consideration of the social and material characteristics of the surrounding locale” and second, “consumer preferences for new products are unlikely to fully develop unless individuals have had the opportunity to interact with different types of housing” (Lovell, 2005, p. 819). Lovell also identifies the momentum of socio-technical systems as critical in understanding why demand for low energy housing has remained relatively muted.

The post-social approach to housing markets represents a marked shift away from the impulse to view the economy, or rather the market, as an abstract and external force. Instead, researchers are invited to unpack such economic models through close attention to the many actors employed in the process of trading property and buying homes. This performative understanding of markets entails an anthropological practice that can shed light on the intersections between the international world of finance, the taxation regimes of governments, the built form of cities, home building materials and the budgets of households.

Housing Policy and Neighbourhood Planning

An engagement with post-social theory has also led to a comprehensive re-imagining of cities and neighbourhoods in terms of the socio-technical processes that comprise urban life (Amin & Thrift, 2002; Graham & Marvin, 2001). Drawing on this perspective, Graham & Marvin (2001) chart how the modern unified infrastructural ideal of the city has been superseded in the late 20th century by complex “processes of infrastructural unbundling and urban splintering” (p. 138). In contrast to a contained and unified view of the city, they argue that urban life is constituted through extended webs of technology and human actors in which multiple interdependences are formed. This approach has encouraged researchers to attend to significant changes in new technology and the ways that such developments affect urban encounters and urban communities (Graham, 2002). For example, Burrows et al. (2005) explore the impact of technology in changing the way households make choices about residential location. They argue that ready access to crime, school and health statistics on the Internet is used to direct buyers towards particular types of neighbourhoods (e.g. safe, middle-class, high-amenity neighbourhoods), a process that facilitates further neighbourhood polarization.

Insights from A-NT have also informed new studies of housing policy and urban planning in the United Kingdom. For example, Tait (2002) examines central and local government conflicts that have emerged in relation to the writing of development plans for new house building. Tait (2002) provides two case studies (a Welsh local authority and an inner London borough) to map out the network of relations between local and central government in issues relating to urban development plans and to show how these relations are constituted and stabilized. Here agencies are understood as “accomplishments which are composed of many connections between different objects” (p. 72). Tait (2002, p. 82) suggests that officers have considerable discretion in ordering the planning process and negotiating ‘spaces of discretion’ and as such formal planning procedures can be used by officers to extend their influence and to control other actors within their network. For Tait, the crucial insight provided by A-NT research is that it provides a basis to map out how resources are mobilized and in turn, how these mobilizations shape the conduct of central-local relations.

A further example of the application of A-NT to understanding housing policy and neighbourhood planning is found in Murdoch's (2000) study of how environmental planning rationalities are impacting upon more traditional housing policies. Murdoch's empirical focus is the publication of the UK government housing planning proposals for the south east of England. He argues that political pressures arising from intensive lobbying by middle-class homeowners in rural areas have led to changes in national policy. He uses the notion of networks to explore the tensions and trade-offs that entangle new housing development debates. Murdoch (2000) claims that an “analysis of government requires attention to the means by which networked relationships are made and to how they flow through practices, arenas and spaces that ostensibly lie outside the formal agencies of government” (p. 505).

These studies provide insight into the constitution of housing policy, neighbourhood planning and the urban form. Not only do they recognize the presence of the non-human, but also how such non-humans actively intervene in and disrupt the order of the city. Moreover, such studies attend to the histories that shape contemporary practices by tracing how ‘things’ such as government agencies are built up into networks and how these networks are mobilized and stabilized over time.

Lines of Resistance

So far the paper has reviewed the early contributions of a post-social turn to the field of housing studies, but what of the challenges for those drawing upon such a radical epistemological perspective? This section discusses three major criticisms that have previously been directed at the post-social turn: (1) that such an approach is insufficiently scientific in that it remains at the level of description and defies grand theorizing; (2) that its proponents extend agency to non-humans and thereby insist on the equal analytical treatment of objects and people; and (3) that post-social accounts are politically conservative and fail to change and improve society.

Post-social accounts can frustrate novice and experienced social scientists as they celebrate rich description and the uniqueness of a given situation while rejecting many of the devices utilized in mainstream social science. Post-social writers share in common a rejection of big theoretical statements and frameworks that operate to contain the boundaries of a given analysis. Instead, they advocate that social scientists follow the actors and their respective ways of framing and explaining their particular predicament. While explanation of a given situation is viewed by many social scientists as their raison d'etre, post-social writers such as Latour (2005) have suggested that the explanation offered by the researcher is of limited interest in comparison to the explanations actors provide themselves. In his words, “if your description needs an explanation, it's not a good description” (p. 147). The post-social, in this sense, offers little comfort to researchers aiming to provide privileged explanations of how things work in practice. In contrast to the promises of earlier social scientific approaches, the claims of post-social writers at the outset are extremely modest, relating as they do to the capacity of social science to produce some unanticipated effects or put another way to spotlight the way in which actors and networks are assembling and reassembling. This incremental, contingent and descriptive view of social science presents real challenges for applied housing researchers who favour generalization as a basis for comparison and cumulative knowledge. Others are concerned that a post-social approach with its antipathy towards a priori frameworks results in an uncompromising monism (Barnes, 2001, p. 343), which can have a paralysing effect on social scientific research and debate as energies are channelled towards challenging ‘big’ typologies and away from the specificity of researching the impacts of housing and social policy.

Of greater controversy is the role of ‘agency’ within post-social accounts, particularly the ‘agency’ that post-social theorists have extended to non-human actors. The principle of symmetry is also at stake here—that is, the attribution of agency to both human and non-human and the equal treatment of the human and non-human within social scientific analysis—that has been so central to early A-NT accounts. The principle of symmetry demands that social scientists approach the research task without any prior conception of which actors, human or otherwise, will be enrolled in particular heterogeneous networks and which actors will play an intermediary or active role. This has led some geographers to ask “how far the symmetrical perspective offered by A-NT can be integrated with a human-centred analysis” (Murdoch, 1998, p. 368). Murdoch (1998) suggests that it is this blindness towards the capacity of people for responsiveness, in contrast to the indifference of objects within A-NT accounts, which presents the major challenge to human-centred analyses. As way of compromise, he argues in favour of retaining an open-mindedness to the formation of networks and which entities will act within such a network, while extending the analytical task to the problem of how such networks are negotiated by those who are partial and ambivalent members. Here, Murdoch (1998, p. 369) cites Susan Leigh Star's (1995) work on classification (see also Bowker & Star, 2000) as an exemplar of this approach. While Star is attuned to how new classificatory schema bring new possibilities for action into being, she also interrogates how human actors assess and respond to the classificatory schema they are enrolled within.

Furthermore, the capacity of the researcher to confer ‘agency’ on humans and non-humans alike has been challenged. Post-social writers with their tendency to draw on case study material inevitably take a primary role in ordering the world they seek to explain. As Thrift (2005, p. 57) notes, A-NT accounts tend to pull “various bits of the world into them as and when it suits their purposes” with a subsequent elision of the “wranglings and tanglings of re-presentational practice”. Instead, Thrift (2005) argues in favour of a cultural studies approach that is attuned to creolization, crossings, interconnections and lateral encounters.

The decentring of the human subject is a challenge for a field that has been grounded in a critical research practice focused on the improvement of social policy. While the post-social can be viewed as an opportunity for extending a progressive political agenda to a broader congregation, one that includes animals and objects as well as people, others may be wary that such a practice simply deflects attention away from pressing human-centred policy problems. For Murdoch (1998, 2004) what is at stake within present debates about the post-social is not merely analytical, but rather political. Alongside other critical geographers, he celebrates the early impulses of humanism, namely the desire to emancipate human beings from the tyranny and domination of nature and dogma. As such he rejects the ‘either/or’ approach that has characterized some post-human (or post-social) writing, and instead calls for a ‘humanized’ post-humanism:

In order to be effective this ‘humanized’ posthumanism would aim to develop forms of critical reflection (that is, reworked notions of justice, nature and humanity) that are appropriate to the entangled ecologies in which we now find ourselves. And it is to be hoped, in turn, that such reflection would avoid slipping into binary simplicities so that we humans can gain access to the considerable resources of both humanism and posthumanism as we seek to navigate our way through the complex relations that comprise our posthuman world. (Murdoch, 2004, p. 1359)

Similarly, Vandenberghe (2002, p. 63) is concerned that naïve sociologists will inevitably end up in the offices of the managers “describing willy-nilly the extant world from their neo-liberal point of view”, rather than explicitly seeking out the stories and perspectives of the weak and the repressed. He is concerned that the post-social can lead to story-telling and re-telling for its own sake rather than attending to the emancipation of the historically disadvantaged.

Certainly, it is true that the post-social approach has taken closer aim at the ‘critical sociologist’ than it has the machinations of global capitalists. In addition, its proponents have signalled the shortcomings of master concepts such as power and exploitation, and instead sought out the unanticipated yet visible effects of particular practices. For those seeking continuity with past critical social science, the post-social offers some promise, but not without some extensive redrafting of what this project might look like. Latour (2005) argues that while the impulse towards political reform and change is right, the timing of critical sociology is wrong with its tendency towards “the premature transformation of matters of concern into matters of fact” (p. 261). Instead, A-N theorists such as Latour want to redefine what it is for social science to be politically relevant. For Latour such political relevance entails being attuned to the “novelty of associations” and practising sociology in a way that “the ingredients making up the collective are regularly refreshed” (p. 261). While such a programme may appear timid compared with the compelling transformative narratives of urban Marxism, Lovell's (2005) work on low energy housing and Miller's (2001) work on inhabiting homes demonstrate well the political possibilities of renewing the boundaries of a social research programme to enable consideration of the relationships between people and their physical environment. In addition, greater understanding of the co-dependency of humans, technology and the environment is at the centre of developing sustainable ways of being in the world.

In view of these criticisms, post-social writers have sought to elaborate upon the moral and political impulse in their work. For example, in his reflections on the development of A-NT Law (2002) acknowledges that in its insistence on following actors and networks A-NT refuses “to discover the shady and heterotopic places, the places of Otherness, that lie beyond the limits of the current conditions of possibility” (p. 92). As such this approach is constrained in its imagination of other possibilities and politically progressive futures. In response, Law (2002, pp. 102–103) argues in favour of making a space for the consideration of ‘Otherness’ or alternative spatialities and calls for the need to rehabilitate notions of fluidity and mobility. Latour also offers another way of reconnecting A-NT with the issue of otherness by recasting our understanding of morality and technology. Latour (2002) argues that “Technologies bombard humans with a ceaseless offer of previously unheard-of positions” (p. 252). He cites the example of the humble hammer which folds multiple temporalities “the mineral from which it has been moulded …. the age of the oak which provided the handle” and multiple spaces “the forests of the Ardennes, the mines of the Ruhr” and thereby allows humans to engage with an array of locales not contemporaneous to their immediate actions. The responses by Law and Latour are therefore to be welcomed in that they indicate a willingness to explore the political implications of their work and consider the criticisms that have been made against their approach. This said, post-social researchers need to remain vigilant to the profound impact of ‘human’ agency and not underestimate its significance in relation to other actors that constitute the field of enquiry.

Conclusion

This paper has described the claims advanced by writers who have been influential in the development of post-social theory. While it has been noted that an explicit engagement with post-social concepts and assumptions has been limited within the field of housing studies, the paper has outlined three sites of investigation (dwelling and domesticity; the operation of housing markets; and housing policy and neighbourhood planning) to illustrate how an investigation of the post-social realm can enrich the scope of housing analysis. It is argued that post-social accounts can provide a valuable extension to the housing studies project, particularly through a renewed focus on materiality and the modification of a priori analytical frameworks within housing research. This extension of the post-social project is particularly dependent on the continued development of housing studies as an interdisciplinary field. Latour's comments are instructive in this regard:

it might be about time for social and natural scientists to forget what separates them and start looking jointly at those ‘things’ whose hybrid nature has, for many decades now, already unified in practice. (Latour, 2000, p. 117)

Finally, whilst a renewed focus on materiality will extend the scope of housing as a field of study, the authors would caution against pitching a new invigorated post-social housing research agenda against the former tired housing research agenda. The post-social message set out in this paper is not one of theoretical salvation nor should it be seen as encouraging housing researchers away from the empirical projects at hand, but it does require researchers to look more closely at their practice and to ask what is missing or silenced within their present accounts.